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Crusader fortress. They built this amazing structure and for a couple hundred years it remained the capital of the final Crusader "kingdom" in this land, but basically they had to live their lives inside it. I did not expect to feel pity for Crusaders but I almost did; for all the damage that the Crusades did (including the destruction of European Jewish communities as they passed through), it was a fool's errand from the beginning to try to establish a European Christian outpost in the middle of a Middle Eastern Muslim empire.

In later centuries these halls were filled in or used as garbage dumps. Even the courtyard was filled in, transforming the original upper story to the ground floor. From the re-excavated original courtyard you can look up and see the neat rows of small square Ottoman building stone up above. The area was used as Ottoman and then British administrative buildings and prison.

But Akko isn’t only a Crusader fortress. Humans have been living in this location for 5,000 years. The original settlement was on a low hill just inland from the Crusader/Ottoman fortress, the tel. Yes, one “L". A tel is the hill that is created after hundreds and thousands of years of humans dwelling in one place. Think about the trash hills that are created at the site of a municipal dump. Whether by slow accretion or sudden destruction and rebuilding, successive layers of the city are built one one site. It is an archaeological mound, often poking up in the middle of an otherwise flat plain. James Michener's "The Source" is a fictional account of the generations of settlement of a tel, set within a "frame story" of its excavation. For more about Tel Akko, see

And...yes, that's what it looks like, a Crusader bathroom. No sewage treatment, but pipes to carry the sewage to the sea. Single-sex--no place for European women on a Crusade, or in the kingdoms that were temporarily established in their wake. The design is similar to Roman and Hellenistic (Greek or Greek-influenced) bathrooms we saw elsewhere. Not much different than what's in airports and shopping malls, other than the lack of walls between the stalls.

More info about Akko's history here: